Earth Changes

Shimla and its surrounding areas were hit by a squall, accompanied by hailstorm and heavy rain this afternoon, causing a sharp fall in day temperature and damaging fruit and vegetable crops.

The inclement weather forced people to rush indoors as the capital town recorded 78 mm rain (74 mm in just two hours).

The hailstorm caused a sharp fall in the mercury and the day temperatures stayed five to six degrees below normal. Fruit and vegetable growers were on tenterhook as stormy conditions are catastrophic for apple stone fruit and vegetable crops.

Now moving north over the warm waters of the open Gulf of Mexico, Tropical Storm Cristobal is expected to gather strength as it heads toward an expected landfall in or near Louisiana late Sunday. Even before it moved off the Yucatan Peninsula, Cristobal was upgraded from a tropical depression to a tropical storm early Friday afternoon. Cristobal is a large, impressively organized tropical storm that will bring widespread impacts to the U.S. Gulf Coast.

As of 8 pm EDT Friday, Cristobal was located about 480 miles south of the mouth of the Mississippi River, moving north at 13 mph. Top sustained winds were 40 mph, making Cristobal a minimal tropical storm.

A tropical storm warning was in effect from east of Morgan City, Louisiana to the Okaloosa/Walton county in Florida (near Destin), including Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Maurepas, as well as for the stretch from Punta Herrero to Rio Lagartos on the east coast of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, including Cancun and Cozumel. A tropical storm watch extended west from Morgan City to Intracoastal City. A storm surge warning was in effect from the mouth of the Mississippi River to Ocean Springs. Mississippi, including Lake Borgne, with storm surge watches for areas on either side - westward from the Mississippi to near Morgan City, Louisiana, and from Indian Pass to Arepika, Florida.

With a small portion of Norway's coastal range slipping into the sea, it does fit perfectly the time line intensification of our four gas giants forming a square in one quadrant of our solar system not seen since 79A.D during an intensifying Grand Solar Minimum.

My question: Does this signal the beginning of more intense global liquefaction events? Let me know what you think about the information presented, does it show a trend?

Floods form a raging river in Tekax, where police rescue stranded residents.

It wasn't so long ago that we were celebrating the arrival of rain. Now residents are mopping and squeegeeing away water that in places is knee deep.

While June is normally part of Yucatan's rainy season, rainfall is 278% above normal, the weather agency reported today.

Cristobal has broken weather records in Yucatan. In 72 hours, Merida has been hit with 13.5 inches of rain. Valladolid was hit even harder, with 17.5 inches, Conagua reported. Oxkutzcab appeared to have the most rainfall: 19 inches.

The storm has "begun its journey toward Yucatan," declared a local weather forecaster.

Seven days after recording the UK's top temperature of 28.3C, the north of Scotland yesterday struggled to a daytime low of minus 1.1C amid a blanket of snow.

Cromdale in Speyside had registered the high of the year so far as the country sweltered in the sunniest spring ever. However, just a few miles away yesterday temperatures fell below zero during the day at the Cairngorm mountain range in Inverness-shire.

"Welcome back to winter," said Luke Miall, of the Met Office. "The north of Scotland has been distinctly chilly for the time of year. At the same time as this low temperature was recorded, the wind was blowing at 70mph."

A 12-year-old boy was killed and another injured on Saturday after being attacked by a pack of more than 12 stray dogs in Muzaffarabad.

The boys were shepherding their goats when the dogs pounced on them near a poultry farm on Dera Ghazi Khan Road.

One child, Muhammad Irfan, died by the time a rescue team arrived while the other, Muhammad Akbar, was admitted to DHQ Hospital in critical condition.

According to residents, the poultry farm's workers used to feed dead chickens to the dogs. They hadn't been feeding them lately due to the coronavirus lockdown and the residents believed that might be why the hungry pack might have attacked the boys.

Lightning strikes claimed 36 lives with some injured in different areas of Myanmar in the first five months of this year, an official from the Disaster Management Department said on Saturday.

From January to May this year, 34 incidents of lightning strikes took place in the country's regions and states.

"Five people had been killed in a recent incident of lightning strikes in Myeik city of Tanintharyi region," said Phyu Lei Lei Tun, director of the department under the Ministry of Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement.

Sixteen people were killed and five others injured in separate incidents of lightning in Pabna, Habiganj, Mymensingh, Bogura, Kushtia and Tangail districts on Friday.

In Pabna, four people were killed and a minor boy was injured as they were struck by thunderbolt in different parts of the district.

The deceased were identified as Hashem, 37, son of Laba of Atgharia upazila; Jalil Ali Sardar, 50, son of Rawshan Ali of Sujanagar upazila; Shariful Isalm, 25, son of Yunus Ali of Chatmohar upazila; and Maniruzzaman Moni, 19, of Ataikula upazila.

Of them, three were killed while returning home from croplands while another died while flying kite in the field.

Amanda appeared to wrap up off the coast of Guatemala, but then it moved inland over the country, which is "rare to see ... let alone during late May," Kottlowski said.

"Once Amanda moved inland, the lower-level part of the storm fell apart, but the upper-level part survived and moved to the western Yucatan," Kottlowski said. "Cristobal's development was associated with a large counter-clockwise wind pattern referred to as a gyre. The Central American Gyre (CAG) is more common during the late summer and fall season."

In this instance, the gyre's circulation forced what was left of Amanda to move back over very warm water in the southern Bay of Campeche "and a low-level circulation quickly formed under that upper-level feature," Kottlowski said. "It did not take time - given the 29- to 30-degree-Celsius [mid-80s F] water - to help create thunderstorms, lowering pressure and a coherent low-level circulation which has become Cristobal."